Thursday, March 15, 2012

My First Award and Freebie!

It has been nice enough here to leave the windows open all night. For Indiana in March... it just feels strange, but I am loving it! Here's hoping it stays nice through my birthday at the end of the month!

I was so, so pleasantly surprised a couple of days ago! Andrea over at One Teacher's Take gave me my very first blog award!

I have really enjoyed reading her cute 4th grade blog, and I would really recommend you check it out! (Higher grade blogs give me so many ideas!) Thank you so much, Andrea, for believing this little blog might go somewhere!

I also had the chance to join Kindergarten Lifestyle's linky party for K-2 blogs, and I have found so many great newbie blogs! If you need a few more blogs to read...

Finally, I wanted to share my first file with you. This is something I use in my second grade classroom about once a week to just review lots of skills quickly.

At my student teaching school, we had a program called Mountain Math, which was great for reviewing TONS of concepts... but unfortunately, it's a program that's a little out of my price range, and required me to keep updating the bulletin board. (At least as a new teacher, it feels like one more thing on my To Do list.) I would definitely recommend the program, because it covers a lot of review that I can't cover here on my sheet, but it just wasn't in the cards for me this year.

Instead, I use what I call My Magic Number. All of the problems on the sheet are about one number. Usually, my class all uses the same number, but I can also differentiate or make sure kids aren't just copying by giving different numbers to to different kids.

My Magic Number touches on place value, even/odd, different forms of a number, ordinal numbers, rounding to the nearest ten, money, one more/one less, ten more/ten less, hundred more/ hundred less, and has a hundreds chart for reference. For a closer look...

My class is really used to the routine. Usually, they pick up one of these sheets inside a page protector and work on it with a dry-erase marker (which, of course, makes everything more fun). We go over it together by pulling the PDF up on the SmartBoard. Every few weeks, I give them a paper copy so I can assess it.

As the year progresses, I move things around on the page and mix up the questions' order so that students don't just get into a pattern without really checking what the questions are asking. Sometimes I add or change what's on it, as well. I like including ones where they have to make a certain type of skip-counting pattern, write their own math problem, or figure out how many more it would take to get to the next ten and next hundred. Let me know if you have any interest in some of the other versions, or if you have any suggestions!

If this looks like something you could use, feel free to grab a copy {here} or pin to Pinterest! (Surely you are all Pinterest addicts like me :)

Thanks for welcoming me to the teacher blogging community! Enjoy the freebie!

Hi, I'm Jenny. I am an elementary reading specialist who's also taught 2nd and 3rd grades. I am passionate about helping struggling kids grow and discover their love of reading, and I especially enjoy integrating science and social studies into literacy learning. I blog about my classroom so that I can share some of my ideas, especially with new teachers, and learn from other teachers too! I would love to hear from you!